


Ado or Edith or Eddie

by scvrvb



Category: IT (2017), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Canon Divergence, I wrote them without congeniality gaiety maybe even likability, No fandom text really consulted for this, What if It (here the Thing) had actually made worse their misunderstandings of each other, Wouldn’t be at all surprised if I were accused of writing them entirely ooc, also possibly for ableist logics if you’re sensitive & vigilant, and maybe actually being uncommunicative and immature in want were problems not boons, content warning for odious homophobia homophobic slurs and the like, not even wikipedia weighed in for this one, rather than King’s nonsense re: companionship and ‘the wheel’, they are honest to me but maybe also too abstracted and unpleasant, very poor accounts of biblical myths, what if instead the boys were knotty and vexing and difficult
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-06-11
Updated: 2018-07-15
Packaged: 2019-05-20 21:01:21
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,591
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14901923
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scvrvb/pseuds/scvrvb
Summary: Magnifying glass on Eddie Kaspbrak, on conflict, on where and when friends aren't friends, or are bad ones, at least. A probe into the Sonia in Eddie, into the Mother(s) King imagines and gives his characters. Or Richie stupidly unwittingly marks Eddie with the tale of Sodom & Lot's wife, and one thing leads to another. Or a retelling of Eddie's run in with Him (Her), It, the Thing on Niebolt Streetcw: homophobia, homophobic slurs, tastes of a real insidious ableism, i suppose (will be editing the tags rating warnings as the later chapters come pouring in)





	1. a story, man to man to man

  
  


“And all of this is true, all of this really happened? You’re sure of it?”

 

Eddie spoke deliberately, in hushes and near-whispers. Richie either couldn’t or cared not to restrict his volume, spouting off animately another inflated retelling of a biblical myth. Eddie willed not to vocalize his responses, most of all his incredulity, as if its mention might damn him to a fate similar to those of Richie’s stories. Eddie’s murmurs wrangled with the slivery grain of his incomplete respiration. It generated a muted chestly friction and inflamed a gravity that was already acrid and coarse. Only when most distracted would Eddie forget the conviction that there watched now something, _the_ Thing, from an unseen dampness. This was not one of those times.

 

The wild thought of one of Richie’s tales leaping from his exaggerations into the present steam of the Barrens wouldn’t leave him. His nervousness quickened in pace, eyes shifting, a dull weakness and shiver-dread. Richie, if asked, would have said they were alone with one another there, the day appearing then unremarkable, barring the hefty tumidity of the air. Eddie, if asked the same, might be more irresolute. Something malignant, like a spore, was mushrooming on the perimeter of his periphery, something he couldn’t name and wouldn’t dare mention.

 

“So said Reverend Craig, so said my folks—”

 

“Do you really believe that, though?” His pause punctuated with a gulp. “All of it?”

 

“Well, I guess so. Doubting them would also mean doubting the Bible, and they say every word of it is true.” Some part of Richie felt absently his liveness drain from him, most of Richie oblivious to this. “Every word” he repeated dumbly to his feet, quiet not by his own design, but by some thickness-spilling fracture in the air, some weight encroaching on his back. Eddie’s slight shakes had transferred to Richie, bewitching his hands, the lilts of his bravado. This genre of propagative closeness Richie detested most.

 

The hop’s attendant heaviness sprouted an anger in Richie, an inarticulable and grey heat. Eddie’s as yet unvoiced belief in a hidden watcher Thing hadn’t been contagious. Richie only sensed wordlessly that his song had been interrupted by a deep still static. Something in his lizard-brain told him a blanket, wet and retardant, had fallen on them. He never would have considered any other suspect responsible for its descent besides Eddie.

 

Yet Richie was not often so easily deposed as affect-determiner. _He_ called the shots: he sculpted or consented to shape of the air that hung around them. But Eddie’s lousy contribution had thrown him off his game, had poisoned his excitement, had soiled their afternoon jaunty tenor. Sometimes he thought, but not-thought, that Eddie’s ill quickness of breath atrophied their shared area, blighted the space between them. A factory-share of uneasiness. Sometimes, maybe he even hated Eddie, Eddie the rhythm-killer, for this. Maybe, then, he loved him most when his viral heavy disquietude got displaced by a levity Richie could tolerate. Sometimes, bits of him guilty, he just had to be louder.

 

“Come on, Eds! The Bible’s got all sorts of weird stuff, demons and witches and lots of chucks. You know, don’t you?

 

Eddie spotted the annoyance and the blame, on his Richie’s face-waves, before settling his gaze on an anthill, feet away. He quelled his quakes as best he could. He hated himself most, maybe, when he saw the edges of his sickness buckle and leak and his friends shrink under its encumbrance; when he receded to concentrate on keeping his toxins from secretion. He would relinquish any presence to a taut laugh, plastic and pore-less.

 

Feeling so inclined, his shoulders fell. He understood now no other force in the actual threatened them here, threatened their placeness and togetherness. Only him. Suddenly he wished very much to be away from here. Alone with himself, where no dosage of toxin, however sharp or suffocating, could infect another. Where he could have holes and hear his own vexing quiver-song.

 

Richie was activated by Eddie’s non-response. A thickly textured want now moved him to reclaim his place and _his_ thing from whatever had quieted Eddie and threatened to choke him, too. He would see to it that the Bible again became full of “lots of chucks,” not warranting shivers or hushes or aches. He would see to it that his field of “chucks” dominated their ground, that Eddie wouldn’t be daunted frozen, that that Thing that Eddie always felt around the corner or behind the bushes was purged. Richie would interrupt this static right back.

 

“Don’t you want to hear the coolest one? Trust me, it’s _super_ wicked.”

 

Richie wouldn’t bother being concerned that the fight in Eddie, the fight to really derail his occupation of center-stage, seemed so suddenly to have left him. As with Eddie’s volume-control, this observation of gaps or gulfs between persons percolated in the non-conscious. He would only propel his words with a smirk, puffed up on his sovereignty. He would only trust his whatever-authority domineering to have curbed Eddie’s poisonous whatever-insurgence. Fear and the Thing it produced, its grunts and dry bloated hisses, needed to face only some volume, some flippancy, to knock it aside.

 

Richie didn’t mind that Eddie had fallen entirely silent, that he now just rocked, his jolts intermittent. In fact, he grinned. Something burgeoning quickened in him, an ache like a pool, an unvoiced pleasure, spectral. Eddie had conceded, sedentary and not-quite-listening. Mousy and waned.

 

Now all Eddie had to do was look up at him, to complain feebly about his nickname, to trace then collapse under Richie’s command over the air. Eddie was to object vocally so he could, riding his brazen spark, ignore him, so he could do it anyway. His lizard-brain revised its earlier thought: _I love Eddie most when he claims to challenge me, a claim neither of us believe, when we can both indulge in me refusing._ It was a place that they shared, but a place whose his-ness Eddie was only to pretend to nay-say. This is the way things worked between them, neither of them needed to speak it. Richie just knew.

 

But this didn’t happen. A stupid frustration bubbled in him when Eddie’s eyes remained elsewhere, his head downcast and his frame sunken. Eddie’s challenges weren’t supposed to be _serious_ , he wasn’t supposed to _actually_ not want whatever Richie was serving perforce. Even now, Eddie’s fight may have left him, but the piston that had pumped it into being still fired visibly. Despite Eddie’s discernible efforts to quench his interior feral-racket, perspiring, despite his silence, he couldn’t remain quiet. His doubt-pheromones had reemerged, re-thickening their little pocket of atmosphere.

 

Richie still felt the sickness, vibrating even quicker now, just underneath Eddie’s surface, could feel him struggling to bottle it, to fasten on the cork, to shield its nakedness. Eddie _did_ still want to hear it, to joke and laugh and recede disingenuously from Richie’s teasing. The static-making piston wasn’t him, it couldn’t, wasn’t supposed to, speak for him. He needed only to be reminded of the way things worked between them, then he would come around.

 

“Try not to piss yourself, Eddie-Spaghetti.”

 

Richie watched as Eddie opened his mouth gingerly to speak but only breathed with a guilty uneasiness. He still didn’t look up at Richie, his machine lung still pushing half-breaths swift shy. Something, some _Thing_ , warm and heavy and serious had fallen on Eddie’s shoulders. They seemed to contort, burdened but vacant. Richie didn’t honestly consider his tale to be the most anything. In fact, Richie still hadn’t chosen which of his as yet untold the Bible stories he thought would wrench protests, non-serious, from Eddie, which would restore the order of their placeness. Still, he persisted.

 

“Come on, ya squirt. Buck up, look alive! Don’t be such a spoil sport.”

 

Richie’s frustration only swelled, walking toward him now. He smelt creeping a weakness or salty unworthiness of his own, springing to his notice.

 

Richie knew with a start which tale he was to recount to Eddie, to bring Eddie back to him, back to their usual play and placeness. His father had seared it into his skull after Richie made the mistake of inquiring about “queers.” Hearing his father’s oft mumblings and occasionally careful reproaches to “fruits and homos,” Richie harbored a rather robust curiosity about what invited his father’s scorn. Of course Richie heard the same epithets spat or whispered among his peers, not infrequently directed at him and his friends. But his father’s measured fixation lent them a legitimacy, a depth.

 

Only once, after Eddie had left one blister of an afternoon following a sleepover between the two, and Wentworth Tozier that night over dinner brought conversation to bear on “that Kaspbrak boy,” had Richie finally acted on his pool of curiosity. His father very well could have been speaking about a plague, about something obscene and insidious imperiling Derry at large. The graveness of his tone had prompted a gut-shriveling worry, a worry for Eddie’s intimated affiliation with the condemned, a worry that his father might even extend the same to him.

 

“Look, I know that he’s one of your main chums, kiddo,” his father had started, a grunt in his voice. “It’s just that that boy is very _very_ close to his mother. That’s always how it starts with those types.” He shook his head, his face painted with disapproval. It splattered the room, his mother looking into her ice water, drinking it meekly.

 

“Ever since I met his mother, always talking about how ‘delicate’ and ‘fragile’ he is, huffing and puffing about all the things he can’t do. Really makes you wonder how she raised him.”

 

Richie had listened patiently, managing uneven eye contact, sublimating his misgivings into jack-rabbit knee bouncing. He knew to listen, even listen with intent, to be silent. But it was eating him, his hush and upright stillness. He wanted to dig deeper, not to be harangued but to be taught, to know the Thing that his father seemed so frightened of. He wanted even more to let spill his twinge gnawing bleed, for his father to quench it, telling him that Eddie was not forsaken, that his fate hadn’t been settled. Instead he waited, keeping in his huffs, eggs of nervous quaking questions. He waited for his father to finish, whose eyes were now needles in his own.

 

“If he ever does something to you, something you don’t like, I want you to come talk to me. I’ll put an end to it.”

 

Richie hardened his pretense of understanding, of thoughtfulness. He _did_ understand to suggest anything other than a heedful posture might provoke his father to turn his philippic on him. The last time he had interrupted one of his father’s “lessons” had escalated first to incredulity, then to a shout, finally to the assurance that the next slight would earn him “some serious discipline, boy.”

 

“I mean it, son. I have my suspicions, and I just want you to be wary. Understand?”

 

Richie did not understand. He did not understand what hung over them, what had incurred the gravitas or the hunk of pressing menace now dining with them. He thrummed with the feeling that he better swallow this non-understanding, to extract it from what had already been said. But if he was to, as directed, view Eddie with suspicion, to raise his guard, he wanted to know why. He wasn’t even entirely sure what he was to be surveilling for.

 

What in Eddie endangered him, what endangered Eddie himself? What made “queers” so dangerous, dangerous enough to warrant his father’s gravitas, his frequent pauses to ensure that Richie was getting it. He wanted to get it.

 

“Hey, you know what it says in the Bible about queers, right son? About the Sodomites?”

 

So he eked out a pale newborn bird of a no, shaking his head, totally benign-like, unassuming. And his father had recounted, with the same dour gruff, the story of Sodom, and of Lot’s wife, whose disobedience, whose foolishness, had been her ruin.

 

Richie’s agitation seemed to have passed into his marrow, too torpefied to bounce his knee. Richie had been shaken to find he, at last, believed himself to understand. To understand that the sight of this sin was damning in itself. That it was to be expunged from view, cropped out of any circle, to be expelled. That it did imperil and endanger even those that merely bore its witness.

 

Months later, standing over Eddie, the tale whipped and writhed on his tongue. A blunt tide jostled his insides, amid the bowels, the lead of his middle. If Eddie heard this, if he _understood_ this, maybe it would leave himself. Maybe the tide would recede, and whatever gulf had disjoined them would sweep away with it. Then Eddie would return his look, if only in glances, would be assuaged of the Thing choking both of them, what was heaving and monstrous and rotted, which dampened their air and severed their links.

 

Surely Eddie would laugh with Richie. Squeal and squirm at the Sodomites, scrunch his nose as if smelling something foul and giggle. Then Richie needn’t even mention his father’s “suspicions” or his own apprehensions to know them unfounded. Eddie would return to him in light of a shared disidentification, his disbelief welcoming Richie to insist and to goad further.

 

“No…” A measured pause, brimful of force, the force Eddie couldn’t harness in words or command. Eddie finally raised his head to squint up into Richie’s face, diminutive but quietly pleading.

 

Richie bloomed with recognition. This is the Eddie he knew, that they both knew and guarded, shared amongst themselves. Or at least the start of him. Opening with mild caviling, insincere, inviting, disagreeing but disagreeing only to yield; they would both grow and grow, with Eddie finally shrinking, his space being swept away, supplanted, by Richie’s. His “no” adrift an ocean of yes, an ocean that Eddie himself finally relent to, swim in, now roused Richie back into their routine.

 

“Come on, just dig on this awhile, will ya? You know the Sodomites? Queers and criminals and others? Well in Bible times, there was a whole city of them, called Sodom, where Lot and his family lived.”

 

“No, Richie. Let’s do something else. I don’t want to talk about this anymore.” The mossy lethargic demur familiar to Richie was vacating his voice. Beneath it congealed a steel and a resolve Richie did not recognize; he carried on in plain misrecognition.

 

“Lot was the only good Christian in the whole bunch, I guess. Because, one day God sends these angels to tell Lot and his family to run away from the city, because God is coming to destroy it.”

 

Eddie still hadn’t adverted his eyes, looked off elsewhere, usually upward, in a play fit of exasperation, as he always did while protesting. He face now showed nothing coy and dissimulated. He wasn’t relinquishing to Richie’s penetrative look, to his taking, while he feigned disbelief, disagreement, with the taking of. He was biting his lip and furrowing his brow, stalwart.

 

“Stop it, Richie, I’m serious, I don’t want to hear it!”

 

“No, trust me, Eds! It’s cool! We haven’t even got to the good part yet.” His assurances weren’t directed at Eddie. Not really. He labored instead to assuage himself, to clinch that Eddie would rescind his opposition, would buckle and give in amid laughter, that this Eddie was his. He needed to hear him cede, to give in, to receive despite his disagreement.

 

“But most important, these angels told his whole family to not look back, no matter what. To look away from God’s punishment and just keep walking.”

 

The blanket, the gulf, whatever it was that trammeled their togetherness, shrunk them into retreat and tumid apprehension, only deepened. The tar blot heaved and unfurled its stink. Something, some Thing, was bubbling up from the ground, growing in pungency. Richie felt Eddie’s shoulders grow cold, pliant, discontinuous, beneath his hands. He’d thought this Thing would, after his phony play-acting, pass between them, inconsequential, into the soil or deliquesce into the low-hanging humidity. Instead, it seemed now to incise Eddie, they both felt him being carved, impressed, with it like a cattle brand. It was perforating Eddie, a boiling bludgeon Richie had been convinced would bring levity and deliverance.

 

But the machinery had already started to churn and tumbled off its scarp. Both of them were sickened-resigned to its inertia.

 

“And even though God commanded her not to look back, she couldn’t resist. She couldn’t stop herself. It was too tempting, I guess.”

 

Richie wasn’t going to let anything interrupt his song again. Maybe Eddie would coalesce to it, restoring their placeness.

 

“She turned into a pile, or a column or whatever, of salt. Because she had disobeyed God, and looked at Sodom.” His final words softer, blunted. He sensed somehow it wouldn’t matter whether Eddie heard him at all, like it came from beneath or behind his speech and pressed into Eddie without him heeding his voice.

 

Once his retelling had dried up, now only exhaust, steaming and spent, had Richie withdrawn. What he saw he couldn’t understand: an Eddie and an air alien and claustrophobic ( _how long had Eddie been crying?_ ). Neither belonged to him, and the severity of their rebuttal twisted his insides and made exigent the tonnage his father planted there that dank June evening. He did not belong in this place that no longer belonged to him, and could not stand to remain, to see what followed when the machinery came to a halt. So he ran.

 

“Stop! Stop it! I want to go home! I want to go _home._ ”

 

His voice gave way to reveal a palming mania, a cauldron and scratches and loose earth. His beseeching plummeted into a register dimmer and croakier. He seemed not to address Richie at all, a Richie he hadn’t noticed had fled, but like his snot and his whines might somehow carry him elsewhere, might annihilate him.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You made it! A quick word: despite all the time spent with and inside Richie in the first chapter this work is Eddie's. It is for and belongs to him. Unambiguously, from here on out, promise.


	2. train-chase

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eddie gets chased by a train whistle & want & himself, from or to Sonia, or away & to some-Thing. Eddie gets confused & scared & hot.

  
  


Richie’s knocks at the cowl-mouth of the Kaspbrak residence just after eleven the next morning lift a sleep-ghoulish Eddie to the entryway. He opens the door in advance of any thought of reticence. There’s Richie on the other side, his weight balanced asymmetrically, unassured and half-daft but present. Like he knows he should be there but he can’t parse why. Eddie wishes instantly he’d had the sense to peek sheepishly from behind the curtain to identify the knocker, to avoid whatever shenanigans might follow.

 

Richie’s apology “for what happened yesterday” drips off his open mouth. Earnest mostly, but incomplete all the same. A few currents in Richie, evidently, did not all agree with those that tendered the sorry. Plausibly, even a handful might rather him have remained at home, head on the floor feet on his bed, forgetting about yesterday, about it all, about Eddie. 

 

But he was here. Showing up as if on cue, as if a parent had ordered him. Eddie had risen and received the visit in a fog. Spittle still dried to the corners of his mouth.

 

Neither knew exactly when goodbye meant goodbye. They’d both pantomimed a farewell, Eddie muttering into the pit behind his elbow, into the dim of his house. Despite the silence, Eddie nor Richie moved to part ways in the wake. Each stared dumbly at the other, stupefied and estranged from a decorum appropriate for the occasion neither was familiar with: Richie into Eddie’s eyes, Eddie at a stretch of inflammation beneath Richie’s right nostril. 

 

They’d waited, waited until Eddie exhaled, a curvy gingerly release, galvanizing him to waddle inwards. His house and Richie closed their mouths at the same time, dim-shuffling away moments after Eddie’s door clicked shut before him. Richie leaves wondering how apologies manage to masquerade as repair when they’re bureaucratic through and through.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Suddenly, Eddie’s at the bathroom counter. Moved there maybe by two gentle fingers from the sky, determined he not feel a thing. Been staring at, over past, forward into, the mirror hanging unconvincingly above the sink. Looking unto, he’d answer if interrogated later. Unto the grime patterns swallowing its looking glass. Tracing his finger along its impasto, its bumpies and trenches. He’d crushed a fly there weeks ago. He left it just in case it decided to try living again. A vat of remorse settled, he tapped its unflattened half. Poor dude. 

 

Eddie may as well have been crawled back to his room. Same humdrum ache. Same effort. Like in the mouth or belly of a sleeping giant. Its stomach lining a low ceiling, muddy and viscous, clenches and exhalation. 

 

Its meaty mass shrunk in time with Eddie’s lungs-diagram-throat. He needed out before the whole organ collapsed to a single point, mangling him. Without thinking, he’s out the door, feet before brain, down and past his street at a pace just ahead of the hesitation that would have ordinarily ensnared him.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Stampeded, monster or monsters, the trainyards were apocalpytic. Just a hue lighter than the ironworks. Laid to waste in abandon, they seemed anemic (unfeeling) and morose in equal measure. They were not a hapless body, veteranized and down on its luck, but still kicking. They were here to rot. Their days of kicking were past. Past like accumulate sawdust, past like fossilized. 

 

He came here on the days oxygen felt most scarce. Today, though, they offer no sanctuary. 

 

Their acres of soot offered Eddie his first brush with dilapidation of the actual. They seemed to want to impart that not everything can keep pace. That many are incapable of chugging along at all. See? Things end. Machines, all things, running with or against time stumble, lurch and keeter, fall flat on their faces, bested. Maybe there was a perverse sort of dignity in refraining from the race at all. 

 

What about _his_ movement, the things he chases after, that chase him? He pauses over all the little wants he’s hosted, took after, spent. All the things that carried him above a trot. They aren’t small enough to fit snugly in a mason jar, a pit of accommodation, satiated; he’s visited by occasional flights from standstill; he keeps secrets, he is, apart from, over and against his Mother. Right?

 

The question-mark-sky zeroes in on his lungs. Maybe he _has_ been floating in a plastic vat, brimful with gel, with just the briefest of discontinuities, of outside and non-slick, since birth. Since before birth, maybe, since the womb. But he gets to feel when the vat-pocket gets laid out, when his mother closes her eyes and he can peer through them. Shove parts of himself through her bellybutton (the gel in Eddie’s hair is placenta). When she’s not rapt postured for vigilance. He can run then, or has to, from Bowers, for the others. Right?

 

The trainyards chimed in. They told Eddie, low winds screeching off mean metal, _kid, every running away from is always a running toward_.

 

This input puzzles him. It doesn’t pass like the low gurgles in his stomach. It remains stuck, a sturdy stubborn kernel, nestled between teeth. It’s inscribed, like the story Richie told him yesterday. Running toward? Toward what. He tried to free the kernel invader with jabs of his finger but his gums have already swallowed it. Instead he gags and sputters, squirming to wretch away from the thing inside him.

 

Run toward what. Question mark size of the sky. 

 

Maybe running from the cadaver, the ghoul, stomping, weasel Bowers = just an exercise in self-preservation. Maybe no effect really but continuity with non-hurt. Running needed only to keep pace with the Same. His mother might even begrudgingly concede. _Alright Eddie alright stay away from those boys._

 

Maybe the sum of all his movement occurs still, only, in stillness, in his Only, _Mother’s_ Only. Like he’s just kicking ‘round in his womb-tomb, as if on a hamster wheel, like he never decoupled or divorced her. Returned dutifully every night. Kissed her cheek, spoke sweetly. Warned the others of his bed time, sanitized and tempered their trysts, the first to remind them of the eye-line of the adults, of their watchfulness — 

 

He’s interrupted by a sound that seems so penetrating that it must have fallen from a place heretofore inaudible to him, where it shriveled only dogs, more sensitive folk, their tails curving inward behind their legs. All nightmare, sans its soporific slowness, came a whistle. Blasted, charred, but still gleaming. A train! A train, impossibly, was screaming, warning of its approach! 

 

But these trainyards are naught but ash and fragrancy and wound. No track would lead here but for want of suicide — no bolt in sight capable of weathering the dead force of those sad mechanical beasts Eddie remembered careening to pause here, occasionally, in years long since past. 

 

As if in smug rejoinder, the whistling exploded in volume, declaring its unambiguous train-ness. Here we come, Eddie! Here _I_ come! What twisted dirt mouth would hog-yell this Eddie could only imagine, a madman flapping out the conductor’s cockpit, worms for a beard and eyes just two emptied orange beams. 

 

Despite the sound still splitting and gnashing, despite its evil persistence, no train rose up out of the horizon to claim responsibility, not even a ghastly mirage cooked from heat wave, a curving of the light, past the fences in the great out-past-Derry. Its raunchy piercing screech-glare like an onomatopoeia for letters outside any human script, but without any apparent agent giving it voice, just the whole sunken devilish place alight in its sound-swarm. He needed to get out, away from here, back into that organ-house, insulated and homeostatic. 

 

A tumor, girth of a golfball, landed in his throat. Or it could have been just squeezed tight to a flower stem. (the officers would gawk, the mortician would definitely measure it, spill it to all his friends: boys neck less than an inch in diameter, you better believe it.)

 

Eddie’s hands flew, hummingbirds if weighted, to his nape, around to the bopping of his Adam’s apple. Some of the sauna air lambasting his diagram left him. No. He could trust his circumference hadn’t shrunk, that all its fluid wasn’t siphoned through a straw, carted off, elsewhere. Here was the throat he recognized, only heaving, only oil-slick and runaway. 

 

Then, without delay or burp or wane, the whistling stopped. It reproduced itself now in the sickly vacuum it left in the afternoon quietude Eddie struggled to recall, a heaving puncture, a perennially perturbing no-longer-ness, still loud.

 

Ground, here. Body, here. No need now for the runway-speed, he’s not taking off, not headed anywhere. He’s here, mildness, stillness. Eddie closes his eyes. No tongue, mouth, pipes, lungs, no respiration, no nothing. Just him here. Finally, his bag-breaths tetter, then tatter back. 

 

The whistle snaps the air again, all sharp short wavelengths. All at once, the sky shrieks, the whistle, as Eddie hears it, only the planet recoiling from the impossibly hot engine of this impossible vanished train. Its needle-point falsetto then sinks registers, shrunken and modulated, into a sickening marrow-tenor. Blinding and vindictive and _offensive._

 

His legs are locust carapace. His knees’ swarm dips, first inward, then back in on itself: imploring use. The first buckle in his legs doesn’t even register his will. Just pure mania. A few more frenetic contortions to realize that he’s running not retiring not reeling relinquishing. A few moments and he’s propelling himself over deadtracks victims cast-offs. (snails, tortoises, all the rest)

 

This morning, Eddie had maneuvered, prowled with the lightest toe he could muster, past mother-couch assemblage, hankering for open air, unpocketed, unenclosed, un-territorialized. But outside, his shoes had still sank in the mud-drum goop of guts, the air still hung mug and loaded. Now, he drew no dirt rain up out of the earth, none cast backward with kick through the metal-mud. Only gummy soil. Not left in the dust, left on his front porch. 

 

Whatever his house became this morning, he hadn’t left it. A coolant, super-gel belly chamber, stifling. Some chunks of Eddie suspected — chunks he would rather disavow — that he would not, he could not, wretch past teeth, move through gums lips bellybutton out into the World by opening his front door. He was in it: it wasn’t leaving him. However fast his legs now moved. The only way out was posited by whatever demon-kin he now sped from.

 

(every running away from is a running toward)

 

That dredging deafening Thing back there. In what direction was it caroling him? Toward what. 

 

His steps only slowed with a thickened retardant impetus. The quicksand only deepens, the sky crunch and troposphere inspissates, worse than molasses. Throat, thyroid, the whole machine, recollapsing with stomach-drop quickness. Like he’s fleeing into a pool but also like he’s on that damned hamster wheel. Lodged. 

 

The snake slithers back, leering: _Sodom. What a thing to run from._

 

That Thing, that spot, suddenly a flood of sickly light, arcs from Out or Outside. Its breath refracted off all the detritus already lived out, exhausted. Bespeaking what he now whipped his legs to carry him from. It emitted a frequency that shook the pulse from the rest of his body. Only legs now. 

 

It churned a thousand stomaches and wetted a thousands bedsheets and cackled through his tissue. Eddie chased the scent of stale couch and antiseptic, his walnut dog-brain bearing him homeward, no matter its maw. 

 

Blanketing the Neosporin chlorox corn syrup was this Outside. Smelling it seemed to change the shape of his nose, his whole face warped rushing to accommodate the new guest, entirely unruly. But the smell seemed also to have been there, always already, planted and long dormant, like he was finally catching wind of the actual inner cavities of his olfactory. Stunk like a sordid strip of skin exposed by a tear in the clothes of the ground, the Ground-ground, in Everything. 

 

Back there was Sodom. _Is_ Sodom. Descending, panting hysterics, lapping along the edges of his purview. Its tangles at his periphery wracked his whole frame, now seconds from total failure. 

 

Eddie while still half-running smelt something else, beside all the unsanitized and the unbathed, the unapologetically textural and unbridled: gravity, a want, a _real_ want, for a real Thing. A disaster-breach, a gape or a hole like the vacuum left from a tard-mass, but a Thing he wants nonetheless. 

 

Warmth percolated to his cheeks. Want. Want far from prophylactics or the non-contaminant. From the indexes and compasses of Mother-crones and her castrato-games. Want to turn his head and see. To apprehend finally the Thing scraping his knees and inviting wrongs. The pathogen spindler and phlegm-farmer. 

 

The first tide of thrill Eddie is matched easily by servings of bleachy repulsion. All the same in cocktail. Despite knowing what Richie told him just yesterday, what he scribed scrawled along him clumsily. Despite crisping beneath its threadbare deadness. Despite his whole perennial organ-world. Despite Everything, he feels the interdiction against turning his direction, against a glance back, cogent just moments before, lose opacity and scribble. 

 

Eddie’s head begins to rotate, marginal and unsure maybe, but chin stretching to join shoulder all the same. Back there. Back there - what is it, It?! 

 

Thinking of contravening all these despites causes warmth to redirect, to travel south. He’s a running flame now. The tradewinds of arousal. Or their fabled cousin, perchance, maybe the very sliver-tip of their reflection anticipated. A bloom in his shorts as he runs, the first taste of a promise of pleasure, always forbidden.

 

The largeness of the Thing behind him, its weight, the stretch of its sound, clicked his body into laundromat cycles, like a tower too tall to measure. He but derogated in its loom, insectival to its thrumping no-placeness. It danced through his clothes at his back like nonsense, but Eddie was convinced he would know its sense. Not bring sense to bear on it: to discern and designate like Stan was fond of doing with Derry’s bird compatriots. But to be burrowed into by its own sense, the sense under which it was sensible. (the shape behind the shape) 

 

Its largeness continued to snatch and snag him, tendrils. Eddie proceeded to orient toward an over-the-shoulder under its regime. It — the Thing! — began finally to enter his field of view, amid the wretched cast of misfit rattlebone train cars and their droppings.

 

Without warning the bellow of Mother — a spat howl of protest and incredulity — overwhelmed him. A _NO_ outside any parameter of volume or scope, larger somehow than either the whistle, the snake, the question mark, the want to turn around; large enough to throw him to his knees, to collapse, before he could catch full sight. A scaling up of gravity to the nth degree swerves his momentum straight into the ground, racking his insides with a shame and a shrivel felt everywhere. 

 

_Get back here! Get back here this instant! What were you doing, way out there, all the way at the perimeter, so far from home, in all the dirt, the rust, the critters? Come back!_

 

His frame ravages itself with non-breath, with inadequate breath, no passage wide enough, spacious enough to return him from his exoplanet of hyperventilation. He feels the gravity bend again, its center falling this time at his place, at Sonia, her world whose orbit he now feels he’s betrayed in abandon. 

 

So, after eternities spent returning his respiration to semi-regularity, Eddie rises, wretched in grime and eardrums despoiled, and goes back.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> SO! tried a few new things with this chapter. more nonsense, on the whole, a bit less sensitivity for error and play? wrote much of the chapter weeks before completing it, so if it reads like it was conceived by two slightly different sets of hands, the latter maybe a bit more worn & careless, it's because it was! would love to hear thoughts, especially takedowns and hot-takes. especially re: my compunction for hyphens.  
> <3


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